Chapter Eighteen #2
“You hate the drive.” Sterling set his mug down with the flat finality of a closed door. “You said the county road is an affront to engineering and also God, and I have that in writing because you texted it to me at two in the morning after hitting a pothole the size of Montana.”
“I’ve grown as a person.”
“In the last twelve hours.”
“Personal growth is accelerated in Montana. It’s the altitude.”
Sterling stared at both of us for a long three seconds.
His jaw worked. The muscle in his cheek jumped once, and I watched him run the calculation—resistance versus curiosity, dignity versus the headache of managing Mitch before caffeine had fully metabolized—and arrive, visibly, at a conclusion that cost him something and was not worth the cost.
He reached into his pocket. Pulled out the truck keys. Set them on the table between us with the expression of a man who knew he was being managed and had decided the argument wasn’t worth his morning.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he said.
“Never,” I said, at the exact same moment Caleb said, “Of course not.”
Sterling looked at the ceiling. The pine boards absorbed his gaze the way they absorbed everything—steady, patient, giving back nothing except the particular warmth of wood that had been holding heat for a very long time.
I grabbed the keys. Caleb was already at the door. Sterling’s phone was in my front pocket—he’d handed it to me this morning to pull up the feed order, and I’d forgotten to give it back, which was either negligent or extremely convenient depending on how the next two hours went.
The drive to Black Butte’s small clinic was quiet in the way that only car rides with something unspoken can be quiet. I drove. Caleb sat in the passenger seat with his hands folded in his lap, staring at the windshield like it contained answers the dashboard did not.
The county road unspooled ahead of us, gray and pocked and objectively an affront to engineering, and I navigated the worst of the potholes by memory because I learned from my mistakes when those mistakes involved axle damage.
Neither of us mentioned the thing we were driving toward. The thing sat in the cab between us, patient and enormous, and the radio played something Jojo would have liked and neither of us was listening to.
The clinic parking lot was gravel and three cars.
I killed the engine. The silence that followed was thicker than the silence had been during the drive, which I hadn’t thought was possible, and then Caleb’s door opened and his boots hit gravel and we were walking toward the front door like two men approaching a verdict neither of us was prepared to hear.
The nurse met us in Exam Room Three. She was approximately sixty, efficient, unimpressed, and clearly a woman who had seen everything this valley had ever produced, including the time Rawley Steele brought in a horse with a splinter the size of a dinner knife and insisted it was an emergency.
She took Caleb’s information without blinking. Asked the questions. Wrote things down on a clipboard that had seen better decades. Her pen moved with the bored confidence of someone who had done this nine thousand times and would do it nine thousand more.
Twenty minutes. That’s how long the test took.
I sat in the plastic chair beside the exam table and watched Caleb’s foot tap against the metal step.
The paper covering the table crinkled every time he moved.
The room smelled like antiseptic and old magazines and the particular synthetic lemon of industrial cleaner, and somewhere down the hall a baby was crying, which was either extremely ironic or the universe’s idea of a punch line.
I was too nervous to decide which.
Dr. Donna came in with a folder. She didn’t sit down. She stood in the doorway with the folder open and said, “It’s positive,” like she was confirming the weather, and the word landed in the small exam room with the force of something that changed the air pressure.
Caleb made a sound. Not quite a word. Something between a breath and a laugh and the noise a man makes when the thing he has wanted for longer than he’s admitted out loud arrives in a clinical folder held by a doctor named Donna who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else.
I reached over and gripped his hand when she sat down and placed the flat end of the stethoscope on Caleb’s abdomen. His fingers were cold.
Mine weren’t much better.
Then Dr. Donna said, “I’m picking up two heartbeats,” and the room did a thing where it got very small and very large at the same time.
I heard myself ask, “Sorry, two?” like I was requesting clarification on a lunch order and not the fundamental restructuring of my entire understanding of the morning.
“Two,” Dr. Donna said. “As in both of them are in there.”
“At the same time?”
She looked at me with the expression of a woman who had been asked this question before and would be asked it again, and the answer was always the same. “Yes, that is generally how twins work.”
Caleb had stopped breathing. Completely. His hand had gone still in mine, and his eyes were fixed on Dr. Donna like she had just declared the sky purple and he was waiting for the correction that wasn’t coming.
The ultrasound machine hummed to life. Dr. Donna squeezed blue gel onto Caleb’s stomach—cold, he flinched—and then the wand was there, moving in slow arcs, and the small grainy monitor beside the table flickered with shapes that meant nothing to me and everything to the woman holding the wand, and then the room filled with sound.
Two heartbeats. Distinct. Separate. Racing each other in a rhythm that was faster than anything had a right to be, filling the exam room’s tinny speakers with a sound that was unmistakably, irrevocably alive.
One after the other, overlapping, a duet written in a language older than words, and I stared at the monitor like it was displaying something from another planet.
Two flickering shapes. Small. Impossibly real. Grayscale and grainy and the most concrete thing I had ever seen in my life.
Caleb started crying immediately. The quiet kind.
The kind he did when something was too large to hold without leaking, his shoulders shaking, his free hand pressed to his mouth, and the sound of those heartbeats kept coming through the speakers, steady and certain, and I realized with a clarity that bordered on violence that those heartbeats were going to grow up looking like Sterling Callahan.
The thought landed somewhere behind my sternum and did not move.
Sterling’s jaw. Sterling’s eyes. Sterling’s way of looking at a room like he was calculating exit strategies and entrance wounds, except on a child, except tiny, except belonging to us, and the contradiction of it—Sterling’s DNA manifesting as something small and warm and entirely without armor—undid me completely.
My eyes did something irritating and involuntary. Something that had nothing to do with crying and everything to do with the fact that the grainy monitor was showing two distinct flickers.
Dr. Donna handed me a tissue on her way out.
I took it. I didn’t use it. I held it between my fingers like it was evidence of something I wasn’t ready to admit, and Caleb’s hand found mine again, warm and shaking, and the heartbeats kept coming through the speakers, patient and certain, counting seconds the way they would count every second from now until forever.
Two. There were two.
Sterling didn’t know yet.
We had to tell him.
I had absolutely no idea how to do that.
* * * *
We walked out into the pale Montana morning and stood by the truck in the clinic parking lot with gravel under our boots and the sky still thin and cold above us.
Caleb said, with the complete conviction of a man announcing the weather, “I want a yellow nursery.”
I stared at him. “We don’t have a nursery.”
“We’ll build one.”
He said it like it was already done. Like the nursery was simply a matter of time and counter space and the correct shade of yellow, and the certainty in his voice—warm, unstoppable, the firm tone Caleb used when he had decided something was happening and the universe was welcome to adjust accordingly—did something to my chest that felt permanent.
I opened the driver’s door. “Yellow.”
“Yellow-yellow. Not pale. Not mustard. Yellow like the eggs were Wednesday good.”
“Those eggs were committed.”
“They knew what they were about.” Caleb climbed into the passenger seat. “I want that kind of yellow. The kind that doesn’t apologize.”
I started the engine. The truck rumbled to life beneath us, and I pulled out of the clinic parking lot with two heartbeats in the cab that nobody else knew about yet, and the weight of that—the enormous weight of a secret this size—settled into my chest alongside everything else and did not move.
On the drive out of town, Caleb talked about names. Two of them. Possibly themed, possibly not, he was open to discussion, but he had opinions, strong ones, and he listed them while I drove and the county road unspooled ahead of us and the morning light thickened through the windshield.
“James for a boy,” he said. “Or William. William has dignity. James has... I don’t know, warmth?”
“James is my middle name.”
“I’m aware.”
“You want to name Sterling’s child after me?”
“I want to name our child after you. There’s a distinction.”
The word our landed in the cab and sat there, warm and certain, and I kept my eyes on the road because if I looked at Caleb’s face right now I was going to do something with my hands that would compromise our ability to stay on this road, which was already an affront to engineering and also God, and we had precious little margin for error as it was.